Time-Lapse Photography with your Inexpensive Canon Camera (CHDK p. 3)

Aerial Mapping With Your Canon Point-and-Shoot

Parts
one and
two
talked about some of the cool features you can enable on your camera
by installing the Canon Hack Development Kit.
But the most powerful CHDK feature is the scripting interface.

Scripting is how I first found out about CHDK --
at a workshop at WhereCamp. Jeffrey Warren of
Grassroots Mapping
demonstrated balloon aerial mapping using a cheap Canon camera
and materials like a cut-up soda bottle, string, a garbage bag, tape,
and open source photo stitching software.

It's a phenomenally cool project. Grassroots Mapping folk have traveled
all over the world: they've helped villagers in Peru and El Salvador
make maps to prove ownership of their homes, and charted the
spread of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Lots of fun, but how does this tie in to CHDK? When your camera is 500
feet up hanging from a balloon, how do you tell it when to shoot photos?
You could build some kind of radio-control gizmo,
but that's expensive and complicated.
All you really need is a script to shoot
at regular intervals -- say, every 10 seconds.

Installing and running a script

To install a script on your camera, mount the camera's SD card on your
computer and copy the script to CHDK/SCRIPTS (or chdk/scripts,
depending how your computer is set up).

Move the card back to your camera and power on.
Press the CHDK Shortcut key to get into ALT mode (see the
previous
article) and enter the
Scripting parameters menu.
The first item is Load script from file... (Figure 1).

figure 1

Once you've loaded your script, run it by pressing the shutter button
while still in ALT mode.
In the case of this chdk-timer script, it will shoot a picture
every 10 seconds until you stop it by pressing the shutter button again.

Pretty neat! Even if you aren't set up to do aerial mapping,
you could strap your camera to the passenger seat of your car and
take a time-lapse video of your commute to work ... or create
time-lapse videos of clouds moving across the sky.